Wattpad has been such a great platform for me, as a writer, to test the waters (no pun intended) with short stories and plots to see how they are received. In fact, the success of both novellas, November Seed, and From Europa With Love started as a short story entries in a SciFi writing contests.

Wattpad is such a great place for readers to get early access to drafts of some great stories being written that move on to become great novels. It is such a great platform for writers to connect with readers , readers to connect with writers, writers to connect with other writers and readers to connect with other readers… there… I think I covered it all.

I come from a lineage of great surfers dating back to the 21st century on Earth. My name is MoonDoggie, a name one of my French ancestors had given to her first born son, a name that could not be repeated for ten generations; so that would be, me.

I was no one special until a botTOG, named Hurn, rec’d a clip of me free falling down the face of Phaedra 18-C. It was on a dare and I was attempting a slide-in backside on a hotMELT. But things didn’t go as planned and I had separated from the hotMELT and did a slomo vertical 360 but managed to get it all back together as if I had planned it that way. Hurn’s clip made me famous as faraway as Sagittarius-Carina and I was splashed onto the cover of sineWAVE. These days, I can’t hit a break where someone or something doesn’t yell out, “Hey MoonDoggie! I dare you….” And that’s when the shit happens. And it’s weird shit.

The baggage that comes with notoriety has been mounting, so much so that my traveling buds are few and I don’t blame them; there’s a circus of bots chasing me these days, hoping to land the next cover and galactic stream. They’re as reckless as the razor scarabs you’d find at Noah’s Cove on Xeries; don’t open your mouth or they’ll find their way in and punch out your chest. My late friend, Oyen, had found that out the hard way. These days I travel solo.

So here I am on Cyan-B, having used the last remaining koins earned from that clip to get me here, bouncing my way through a couple of tokamak gateways, then knowing a guy who knew a dude running calibrations on a neckerCube who got me the last jump all the way back to the Orion Spur. The dude had also provided me some bogus metaProfs to use as chaff just before the last jump to throw off any botTOGs shadowing me. Guess it worked, not a one in sight.

It looks like Twig’s forecast had been spot on, the surf looks awesome, and as far as I know it’s the first time anyone has ever been here. I didn’t find out why until after I landed and read through the hyperLogs; turns out there’s a large amplitude dark matter wave just outside Joule, the binary star system I’m in, and my chances of successfully having gotten through that without being ripped to pieces, was like… well… one out of every 3.14. Lucky, lucky, lucky me. I must be down to five lives now. Getting out in one piece might drop me to four.

There’s a feeling only surfers get when coming across a virgin break and here I am… staring out at one. The fact is, I’ve never surfed in water; I mean Earth-like water, H2O with a salinity of 33 ppm. But this is why I had dragged an oldie from Earth, a 5.8 FocusFlex, quad-fin, V2 by DaveySky. This stick had been handed down through the generations and hasn’t been used since it was custom carved for the first MoonDoggie back in 2017. And there are very specific conditions to be met prior to its use:

White powdery sands [check]

Turquoise water [check]

Suns overhead without a cloud in the sky (ok, the kit mentions just one sun) [check]

Surface water and air temperature holding at or above 80F [check]

Shoulder to head-high right point-break [check]

Light offshore breeze [check]

I’m using it.

It actually felt good with the suns on my back and my feet buried into the sand as I read through the manual, which had all sorts of crazy vids associated with it, like: paddling, posture, duck-dives, pop-ups, drop-ins, cut-backs, aerials, etiquette, you name it. This should be a space-walk for me.

Step One: Attach leash. Running down the beach with a leash around my ankle ( a crazy relic of the past) was constantly tripping me. Why they used these things remains a mystery. I mean, isn’t that why magPads were invented?

Step Two: Get Stocked. Reaching the water I shouted out at the top of my lungs, “I’mStoked!” Whatever that means, but apparently it was a phrase my ancestors had used before hitting the waves. I’m glad no one was around to hear me, but who cares, the only person here, is me.

Step Three: Enter water. It felt weird to be in contact with water, and the board shorts that came with the kit look and feel ridiculous on me.

I have followed all the instructions, all the way down to using the sex wax of the deck. Sex wax?

‘Seek out and have fun with Nature,’ were the last words written in the kit. So who is this Nature?

After performing my first successful duck-dive, watching the barrel roll over me, I surfaced and felt the heat of rotors raking me from above.

“Hey wormhole! Watch it!”

Hovering above me was a girl on a slat wearing full skins and a lens.

Shit! Where did she come from?

I could tell from the tilt of her head that behind the lens she was giving me a look. She throttled up, the spray blinding me momentarily. When I could finally see, it was too late. I got pummeled by the next wave in the set.

By the time I got out beyond the break, my arms were spent and the girl had already caught the next two sets. So much for virgin break. I was anxious to catch a wave, but waited patiently just like the kit had instructed me to do. I was to ‘chill’ here for a time, letting the first set roll beneath me, a gift to Nature. This Nature was starting to piss me off.

Never having ridden an oldie before, the biggest hurdle was perspective. I was not comfortable being so near the surface, let alone in the surface. How could anyone see what was coming? The kit instructed me to look for a dark blue line on the horizon, indicating an outside set was coming in. Seriously? But there it was, a dark blue line appearing on the outside. I kept paddling until I could see the set rolling in. I’ll be damned… It was a huge set.. Now I was instructed to sit up on the board–a bit wobbly– and rotate toward the beach. As the wave neared, I was to grab the tip of the board, lean back and push it down under me, then let it pop back up and forward, giving a nice boost into the wave. Slick. That actually worked and I wondered if I could do the same on my hotMELT? I kept my back arched, like the kit instructed, cupped my hands and stroked alternately until momentum took over. Dude, that was awesome and I knew the rest would be easy as I popped up and dropped….. in…. on the girl with the slat, knocking her off into the water, the leash around my ankle yanking us up into the wave as the ceiling pitched us over, my ribs hitting down hard on the board. We were in a tangle but I managed to reach down and grab her by the waist then followed the leash to the surface after the wave had passed. Ah…. that’s where the leash comes in. Smart. She was coughing hard and sucking in air as the next wave closed out on top of us, then once again by the third wave in case we hadn’t received enough punishment from the first two. When I came up, she was floating face down with her lens off but still within reach. I rolled her up and onto my board, enough so I could peel back her skins and breath air into her. Finally she spit up into my mouth, sucked in and coughed up more water, but by then we were near enough to shore for me to stand. I lifted her over my shoulder, the leash dragging my board onto the beach where I dropped down onto my knees and rolled her out onto the sand. I made sure she was still breathing before I collapsed onto my back. My hair was matted over my eyes and my eyes were caked with sand. I had sand in places I didn’t know sand could get into. But the worse was hearing and feeling the sand crunching in my teeth, sending electric chills down my spine. If that wasn’t bad enough, that’s when the punches started.

“YOU PLASMA SCUM!” she screamed in rhythm to her punches “ARE YOU MISSING SOME BITS?”

She momentarily stopped and was looking out over the cove for her slat. WHERE IS IT? WHERE’S MY SLAT?”

I didn’t have time to answer the first question before more punches followed, punches that I could hardly see coming. If it wasn’t for her state of weakness it could have been a lot worse, but I managed to grab hold of her wrists and keep her still, until she straddled me and drove her knee up into my groin. These board shorts are for shit. Fortunately the pain was so intense my forehead shot up into her temple and that was the last thing I could remember.

We came to around at the same time. She was rubbing the side of her head with her hair and face plastered with sand. I sat up with my arms propped up in back of me.

“Are you, Nature, by any chance?” I asked.

She gave me a sideways look. “No you warp…” she replied. “Are you, Stoked?”